32 THE DUBLIN II TRAP TRANSFERS OF ASYLUM-SEEKERS TO GREECE the night together with more than 100 hundred people. Around 13-14 people at a time were transferred onto a small boat. In the morning they were arrested and questioned by the Turkish police. Because he was afraid of being expelled to Iran, he said he was Iraqi. After a few days he was transferred to the Kurdistan region of Iraq. There he was allegedly detained in Erbil for two and a half months before being released in May 2007. In October 2007 he again fled to Turkey, as the situation in northern Iraq was not safe for him. After a month he reached the Greek island of Kos on a small boat. This time he was not detained, but received an order to leave the country. Fearing that he would be forcibly returned to Turkey, he traveled irregularly to the Netherlands. S.E. told Amnesty International that although he informed the Dutch government that he wished to apply for asylum, he was arrested and detained for two months because he had used a false passport. Afterwards he was held in immigration detention for another two and half months. As of February 2010 the Dutch authorities were still seeking to transfer him to Greece. In other cases, the difficulties in obtaining or renewing a pink card have resulted in a risk of refoulement for registered and unregistered asylum-seekers including Dublin II returnees, before an asylum determination procedure has been completed. S., an Afghan woman, was transferred from the Netherlands to Greece in 2009 under the Dublin Regulation. She states that she worked for an international humanitarian NGO in Afghanistan. She claims she is in need of protection because her brother had been attempting to force her into marriage and had subjected her to beatings, which resulted in her partially losing her sight in one eye. S. told Amnesty International representatives that her pink card was stolen in Thessaloniki and that she immediately reported this to the police station. However, the police officers detained her for a day, threatening to send her back to Afghanistan, since they did not believe that she had had a pink card in the first place. She was eventually able to call a social worker from Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World), who had assisted her and could confirm that she was indeed a registered asylum-seeker. Only after this intervention was she allowed to leave the police station.115 The GCR provided information to Amnesty International about the following two cases: A. is a Pakistani asylum-seeker who arrived in Greece in October 2007. He managed to submit his asylum application in June 2008. When he went to renew his pink card in December 2008, the police postponed the renewal repeatedly from one Monday to the next. Because his card was not renewed, he was caught by the police in February 2009. He showed them his card but they insisted that he was staying illegally in Greece. In March 2009 GCR received a certificate stating that A.’s application was still pending. The lawyer immediately took the certificate and gave it to the deportation department, where the lawyer was told that A. was at the airport about to be deported. His deportation was cancelled almost at the last minute. On 22 April 2009 GCR received a phone call from J.S., who told them that he was in Turkey at the Edirne centre [detention centre for foreigners] together with his friend K.A. Both of them are Afghan asylum-seekers who had been in Greece since September 2007 and whose cards are still valid. They said that they had been approached in the area of Evros by people who reportedly offered to hire them for agricultural work but who later threatened them with guns, and took their money. The men, claiming to be police officers, ignored the fact that J.S. and K.A. had both shown copies of the cards identifying them as asylum-seekers, put them in a plastic boat, crossed the river which forms the border between Greece and Turkey, and left them in Turkey. GCR was in contact with J.S. and K.A. for a short while after their expulsion to Turkey; they reported that they were to be sent from Turkey to Iran. This information was confirmed to GCR by a Turkish lawyer. Amnesty International March 2010 Index: EUR 25/001/2010